People

Teams - Patricia
"Patti" Moore, Operations
Lead, NASA Increment 6

Patti Moore was NASA's Operations Lead (Ops Lead) in Russia during the Wolf
Increment. Her duties included coordinating communications between Mir astronaut
David Wolf, NASA, and Russia from the Russian
Mission Control Center.

As an Ops Lead, Moore was in charge of the Mir Operations Support Team in
Moscow, where she managed a group that included a flight surgeon, a payload
engineer to troubleshoot science equipment problems, a mission science representative,
a systems engineer who kept Johnson Space Center officials informed about Mir hardware problems, a timeline engineer for scheduling purposes, a public affairs
representative, and a biomedical engineer.

Ops Leads such as Moore followed crewmembers through training at NASA and at
Star City, Russia, enabling a good rapport with the crewmembers and a solid
knowledge of the experiments the Mir astronauts would be performing on-orbit.

Prior to her Moscow assignment, Moore worked on Spacelab projects in the Payload
Operations Control Center at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Alabama.

In her Oral History, Moore commented on the expectations she had concerning
her duties in Russia: "I'm from Spacelab world, and when you're working a Spacelab
mission, you come off console totally drained, mentally and emotionally, basically,
because for 14 days you're just really running and going.

"When I started this I was going, 'I'm going to be bored. You only talk to
the crew twice a day.' I mean, there's only contact with the crew 10 minutes
per orbit. That's really amazing. I thought, 'Wow. There's too many people over
there; we don't have enough to do. We're going to be sitting around a lot.'
That was not the case at all.

"We were all busy every minute from the time you walked in the door until the
time you left in the evening, and sometimes it would get a little overwhelming,
but really the workload was steady. It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle
sometimes."